The subject matter discussed in the background section should not be assumed to be prior art merely as a result of its mention in the background section. Similarly, a problem mentioned in the background section or associated with the subject matter of the background section should not be assumed to have been previously recognized in the prior art. The subject matter in the background section merely represents different approaches, which in and of themselves may also correspond to embodiments of the claimed inventions.
Conventionally known search indexing provides means to collect, parse, and store data so as to facilitate fast and accurate information retrieval including optimizing the speed and search performance in finding relevant documents or information responsive to a search query. The problem with conventional search indexes is that despite their usefulness, they very often contain customer information which may be sensitive in nature.
Certain existing solutions overcome this problem by crudely encrypting the entirety of an index file upon updates and additions and then again decrypting the entirety of the index file for all search indexing. While such a solution may be feasible for very small indexes, larger databases by their nature result in significantly larger search indexes, easily ranging into the hundreds of megabytes when stored on disk. Consequently, encrypting and decrypting the entirety of such large search indexes fails to scale up for larger implementations and becomes wholly infeasible after the search index files surpass a certain size on disk as the computing infrastructure simply cannot decrypt the large files and execute the requested search within an acceptable period of time.
Further still, existing solutions of encrypting the entirety of a search index leave the encrypted search index open to frequency based attacks, despite the encryption and in addition to unacceptably slowing search index processing, existing solutions relegate search to exact term processing only and eradicate any ability to perform wild card searching.
The present state of the art may therefore benefit from the systems and methods for implementing an encrypted search index as is described herein.